Strike For Black Lives
By 
For thousands, this Monday isn’t a typical workday. In fact, it isn’t a workday at all. They’re on strike. Frontline workers in dozens of cities are participating in the Strike for Black Lives, which links racial and economic justice amid a catastrophic recession and protests over police brutality. Supported by a coalition of unions that includes the Service Employees International Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers union along with advocacy groups like the Poor People’s Campaign, the strike has a simple premise: If Black lives truly matter, Black workers need unions, living wages, and health-care benefits they can actually use.
“This strike is an expression of our members’ fierce belief that there is a reckoning in this country, both on unchecked corporate power that has caused too much poverty and on systemic racism that has caused the over-policing and criminalization of the Black community,” Mary Kay Henry, the president of SEIU, told Intelligencer by phone. “We see the strike as a way to unite with the Movement for Black Lives and all of the partners in this struggle for justice by using economic power to say we want to win justice on every front.”
Workers, of course, have understood the connection between racial and economic justice for a long time. So have civil-rights leaders. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, he was there to rally support for striking Black sanitation workers. His Poor People’s Campaign, lately revived by the Reverend William Barber and the Reverend Liz Theoharis, established racism as the axis around which a series of economic injustices revolves. But the events of this year take historical truths and project them wide-screen, filling our whole field of vision. The coronavirus kills Black and brown people at the highest rates. The recession the pandemic created saps wealth mostly from Black and brown households. And the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor illuminate the far reach of prejudice. The precise statistics change for each crisis, but the reality they convey is constant: Racism impoverishes and kills.
That fact affects every aspect of Lisa Elliott’s life, including her work at a Detroit-area nursing home. “Our managers don’t even speak to us. Being a Black person and working in any nursing home during this time is very hard. It’s very stressful,” said Elliott, a certified nursing assistant and SEIU member who is participating in Monday’s strike. She’s had panic attacks as she’s worked through the pandemic, she explained, and the racism she experiences on the job contributes to her stress. Most workers in Elliott’s facility are Black, and, according to her, managers ignore them when they ask for better COVID-19 prevention in the facility. Managers barely listen to them at all, in fact, and treat them mostly as the help. Rather than pick up for themselves, they even leave personal trash behind for the Black housekeepers to clean up.
When Black workers complain, Elliott added, the same managers call them insubordinate and the facility’s administrator is no help. “To be honest with you, the administrator really thinks that all we do is lie. He thinks all Black people lie,” she said. That unfair treatment filters down to the home’s Black residents, she added. “In the upstairs dementia unit, the Black residents don’t get treated well at all,” she said. White residents in the rehabilitation unit get hot meals and a variety of food. “But the Black residents, they give them what they give them,” she continued. The meals are often cold.
Class and race are of course intertwined in this nation. You can’t really separate them out. There are certain issues that affect all workers and there are certain issues that affect all Black people (and others that affect other people of color). But the issues often overlap. And organized labor needs to get at the forefront of making these connections, since the future of the labor movement is people of color, especially women.